Marketers and developers. Are we really even the same species? The degree to which I don’t understand my coworkers over in marketing can be aptly summed up in 4 words: “Windows Mobile 6 Professional.” The product’s great, but the name? I would probably have called it something else.
Not that I’m suggesting that I’d have done a better job in naming it. Me doing marketing is like a fish riding a bicycle. Actually, that’s not really a fair comparison. The fish has a better chance of pulling his task off. And I’m not saying that developers are “normal” compared to marketers. To any outside viewer, I’m sure that neither of us seem to be human. But, whatever alien life form developers are, it’s clear that marketers are a different one.
Even though I don’t understand Martian, I’m going to try to explain the new Windows Mobile naming scheme.
Codename: Danger
Many people who work on “secret” stuff use code names to refer to it during development. The idea is that, if the name ever leaks out, the press won’t really know what it’s for. And, if necessary, we can just change the code name to confuse them.
Up until the very recent past, our code names were nice and colorful. For a while we were on a fantasy kick and used names like Gryphon, Wyvern, Rapier, and Merlin. After that, we had a number of names that didn’t follow any sort of theme: Stinger, Ozone, OzUp, and Magneto. Cool names can be fun, and make for great t-shirts. But there’s a danger too. Apple, for instance, was once sued when one of their code names leaked out. And our most recent one, Crossbow, has potentially negative implications. Is it a weapon or a poison? Neither is particularly nice.
Moving forward, we’re going to use simple, non-threatening code names like “7.” It’s not like we were fooling anyone anyway. “Guess what. Microsoft is going to make a version of Windows Mobile that comes after Six!” Not exactly shocking news.
I won’t say that the world’s coming to an end as a result of this. But the t-shirts certainly aren’t as fun as they used to be.
Of CE’s and WM’s
Since, we spend most of product development referring to the product by its code name, we usually don’t learn the official marketing name until a little while before the rest of the world does. So it wasn’t very long ago that I learned that this release was going to be called, “Windows Mobile 6.”
Now, on one hand, the name is completely appropriate. There’s a ton of cool new stuff in WM6. On the other hand, when I heard it, I screamed out in abject horror. You see, Windows Mobile is based on Windows CE, and we’ve just recently released Windows CE 6.0. Windows Mobile 6, however, is still based on the previous version of CE.
Basing the product that became WM6 on CE5 made total sense. You need a stable OS under your feet to release big changes in all the stuff that runs on top of it. CE6 and WM6 were developed at the same time, and there’s no way we could have done the latter on top of the former. But . . . but, Windows Mobile 6, which runs on Windows CE 5 instead of Windows CE 6? It makes my developer’s head hurt.
This is where the marketers remind me that, while they might not be human, neither am I. They assure me that only developers care about things like matching OS and App numbers. Normal people care more about what their new phone does for them. In other words, you’re more interested in the fact that we now have smart filtering in email (I call it “smart dial for email,” and it rocks) than the version numbers of the various components that went into the product.
I can buy that. I may not be a normal person, but I do play one on TV. I love my WM6 devices. I just pretend that CE 6 doesn’t exist yet. It lets me sleep at night. Okay, that and exhaustion. (Have you tried Crackdown yet? Talk about late nights….)
Professional smart classical pocket phone standards
But what’s this “classic, standard, professional” thing? As far as I can tell, even Martians and bicycle riding fish think that’s nuts. Rest assured, there is method to this madness. But, um, well, the method is kind of convoluted.
The marketers had a tough problem here that they needed to solve. The problem was that we were distinguishing our two products with the names “PocketPC" and "Smartphone,” but the rest of the world was using the term “Smartphone” for things that we were calling “PocketPCs.” We kept having conversations that went like this,
Customer: “I tried to put this Smartphone software on my device and it didn’t work.”
Us: “You have a PocketPC, not a Smartphone. You need to use the PocketPC version of the software.”
Customer: “No I don’t. I have a Smartphone. It even says so on the box.”
It was clear that we had to get rid of the names “PocketPC” and “Smartphone.” But we were facing another problem. Over the last few years we’ve been consistently making PocketPC more and more like Smartphone. We’re going to continue on this path and, eventually, the only difference between them will be that one has a touch screen and the other doesn’t.
As confusing as the “Standard” and “Professional” names are now, they’ll make sense when we get to that world. And it would probably be worse to change from SP/PPC to something that makes sense now, only to change again to Standard and Professional in the future. So the real choice was between suffering through the “Smartphone” confusion for longer or suffering through the “Standard” confusion now, with the understanding that it would eventually make sense to people. I don’t know which is the better choice. That’s why I make my living writing code rather than naming products.
In my blog entries, I think I’m going to talk more about “touch screen” vs “non-touch screen” devices than “Professional” vs “Standard” devices. Maybe that will help bridge the gap for now.
In Conclusion
Net net, if you want the new version of what used to be called “Windows Mobile 5 Pocket PC Phone Edition” or if you want a device that has a phone and a touch screen, you want “Windows Mobile 6 Professional.” If you want the new version of what used to be called “Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone” or if you don’t want a touch screen, you want “Windows Mobile 6 Standard.” Windows CE 6.0 is a completely different beast. Yes, we know the names are confusing. Please bear with us.
Mike Calligaro
